Saturday, January 31, 2015

...................................................................................................................................................................COMMENTS:* Poor Scottie has to follow the constitution rather than demonize poor people. it's just not fair.* He's just another pitiful Republican who does not care about the poor or middle class. If he wants to drug test anyone, it should be the fat cat bankers in this country who almost caused another great depression. He would probably find that half of them are on drugs of some kind. The Republicans love to make people think that all the people on welfare are trying to cheat the system and that the government is to blame for all of the country's problems. Sooner or later, the true workers in this country are going to wake up and realize that the Republicans only care about two things....rich people and big corporations.* if they test the people then people in congress, including walker should be tested. Fair is fair.
...................................................................................................................................................................Working Mom On Food Stamps Hits Back At Scott Walker’s Plan To Drug Test Her
By Alice Ollstein, January 30, 2015

Wisconsin’s low-income workers and some members of Congress are speaking out against Governor Scott Walker’s call for making people on public assistance undergo a drug test. Governor Walker confirmed in a Q and A at the conservative American Action Forum in DC on Friday that the 2015 budget he will unveil Tuesday will include measures that cover those who need food stamps, Medicaid and unemployment benefits, among other programs for those in poverty.

Walker claimed his motivation for the controversial move was feedback he’d received from Wisconsin companies. “As I traveled my state, I hear employers, small business owners say, overwhelming: ‘We have jobs. We just need workers. And we need two things: people who know how to show up every day for work, five days a week, and gimme someone who can pass a drug test,’” he said.

But Jennifer Epps-Addison with Wisconsin Jobs Now questions this rationale, and accused the Governor of “stigmatizing the hardest working people in our economy.”

“This is not about the workers,” she told ThinkProgress. “This is about Governor Walker playing to the dog whistle politics of the worst of his base as he follows his presidential aspirations.”

The cost of such a program is unknown, and the proposal comes at a time when Walker needs to dig his state out of a budget shortfallthat could top one billion dollars.

For Wisconsin workers who currently depend on public assistance, like 21-year-old Milwaukee waitress Peyton Smith, the burden of the law would be much more personal.

“For [Governor Walker] to put another barrier in front of us is like saying we’re guilty, but we’re not guilty,” Smith told ThinkProgress. “It’s already hard to go down there and file for government assistance. We have to report in every day, fill out papers. Now I have to take the time out of my busy schedule to take a drug test? Come on!”

Epps-Addison, who depended on food stamps when she began law school at the start of the Great Recession in 2008, echoed Smith’s difficult experience in signing up for public benefits.

“There were times even I couldn’t navigate the process, as a law student with a college degree,” she said. “The system is set up to disempower people and make them frustrated enough to give up before receiving the help they need.”

Smith, who has a three-year-old daughter and another baby due soon, works about 20 hours a week at Denny’s — though she has repeatedly requested full-time employment. Because it’s a tipped job, she makes just $2.33 an hour, and currently relies on food stamps to feed her family.

“I’m willing to work. I’m not lazy at all,” she said. “But the jobs we can get are horrible, low pay, and we can’t get the hours we need. As a parent, it just sucks. I want things that are healthy for her, but the fruits and vegetables she needs to grow as young child are expensive.”

Courts have ruled that similar mandatory drug testing programs imposed by other states and the federal government were unconstitutional. In striking down Florida’s law, a federal judge wrote: “[T]here is nothing inherent to the condition of being impoverished that supports the conclusion that there is a ‘concrete danger’ that impoverished individuals are prone to drug use or that should drug use occur.”

Programs in other states have netted only a handful of drug users at great expense to taxpayers. But that hasn’t stopped states with newly elected conservative governors, or reelected in Walker’s case, from moving ahead with the policy.

Governor Walker, who is widely expected to run for President next year, lamented in his speech Friday that he can only implement such a drug-testing program with approval from the Obama Administration, which he is unlikely to get.

“This is a classic example of where the federal government tends to push back and say, ‘You can’t do that,’” he said.
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...................................................................................................................................................................COMMENTS:* Here's hoping that Bobby's trolls are a step up from Huckabee's.* I don't know where the author has been, but Jindal's whole political career has been one long shameless pander to, and promotion of, the looniest and most authoritarian and theocratic right-wing Christians. So, a few years ago, when he told Republicans to quit being the stupid party, he only proved himself to be an outrageous cynic. One long shameless career of shouting to the yokels "Believe me! I'm not an Indian! I'm not a Hindu! I'm just like you!" In a word, he's despicable.* The fundamentalists Rightwing will never assimilate. Unfortunately for them mainstream culture is changing at increasing speed. The science deniers are an increasingly small and unassimilated minority. I promise to tolerate those dominionists as long as they last. On the flip side there are over a hundred languages spoken in New York City. But those living in cultural enclaves are busy watching the Biggest Loser and Law and Order SVU. There kids will be less bicultural and their grandchildren will barely know their heritage. It is an old American story.
...................................................................................................................................................................Bobby Jindal’s public humiliation: Why there’s a nasty side to his thirst for power

The Louisiana governor's new 2016 rebrand is not just an embarrassment — it's worse. Here's why

By Elias Isquith, January 30, 2015

Of the many rituals that accompany U.S. politics, one of the least-important but most-discussed is the spectacle of watching a hopeless, clueless and joyless presidential campaign falter on the runway before swiftly concluding in a fiery crash. Every four years, there’s at least one — and often more than one — such campaign. The candidate is usually already a figure of derision among the press, and it’s often not clear to outsiders whether even they truly believe they will, or even should, become the president. The whole quadrennial enterprise tends to be either a guilty pleasure or a cause for sorrow, depending on how idealistic (and sadistic) you are already.

Some recent examples: In 2004, Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich was the at least somewhat earnest candidate that the press preemptively dismissed, while Rev. Al Sharpton was the one whose sincerity was widely questioned. Kucinich reprised the role somewhat in 2008, but had competition from former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel; Sen. Joe Biden, meanwhile, was the guy the press didn’t take seriously enough to let voters decide for themselves. On the Republican side in 2008, Rep. Ron Paul ran a heartfelt campaign that the media deemed unserious, while one-time ambassador Alan Keyes provided comic relief. And in 2012, one of the media’s favorite punching bags, Rep. Michele Bachmann, was a kind of right-wing Kucinich, while pizza mogul Herman Cain left many wondering whether he was engaged in an elaborate form of performance art.

At this point, it’s too early to know for sure who will fill these designated roles in the 2016 presidential race. And if former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton nabs the Democratic nomination with little effort, as many expect, the potential cast of characters will be smaller than is the norm. Still, it’s starting to look like there will be at least one presidential candidate who will waste everyone’s time by pursuing the White House. I’m thinking, of course, about the nascent presidential campaign of Gov. Bobby Jindal, who has begun flirting with some noxious forces in our society, and who is otherwise completely undeserving of anyone outside of Louisiana’s attention. Jindal will never be president — but whether his campaign is remembered as a routine failure, or a shameful disgrace, is far less certain.

Most of the worst stuff Jindal’s done lately has flown under the radar, so here’s a primer for those of you who haven’t paid much attention to the Louisiana pol since 2009, when he blew his State of the Union response by reminding everyone of “30 Rock’s” Kenneth. While Jindal still hasn’t formally announced his intention to run for president — and hasn’t even launched the pro forma exploratory committee, either — his desire to live at 1600 remains one of Louisiana’s “worst-kept” secrets. Yet ever since that embarrassing introduction to the television-watching public, Jindal’s had a problem: beyond his own ambition, a reason for him to run has been hard to find. And with each new iteration of a pre-campaign shtick, Jindal gets worse and worse.

Initially, Jindal wanted to be seen as a new kind of Republican, a GOPer for the Obama era. Needless to say, Jindal’s Indian ancestry was a component of this framing. But so was his allegedly fearsome intellect, which earned him degrees from Brown and Oxford and made him a Rhodes scholar. When his disastrous TV debut necessitated he shed that persona in favor of another, however, Jindal decided to go the other way, presenting himself as the ultimate anti-tax governor. He proposed Louisiana scrap income taxes altogether, but in part because his plan made up the revenue difference with sales taxes, which disproportionately hit the middle and working classes, the policy achieved little beyond sinking his approval rating. It remains low to this day.

After President Obama’s reelection in 2012, Jindal seemed to think he had another chance to claim the mantle of Sensible Republican. He charged out of the gate in 2013 with a call for the GOP to “stop being the stupid party,” which was, as you might imagine, not particularly well-received by the people who thought he was calling them stupid. Having seen his latest attempt fizzle out nearly as soon as it had started, Jindal proceeded to lay low for a while, but did little to change the perception that he still intended to run for president. Over the past few weeks, though, we’ve gotten a sense of what the latest version of Bobby Jindal might look like. And it isn’t pretty.

Lately, the man who urged his fellow Republicans to stop being stupid has grabbed headlines by pandering to the Islamophobic sentiment that’s widespread among the fundamentalist Christian bloc of the GOP base. The first sign was Jindal’s embrace of a paranoid fantasy that’s increasingly popular among far-right Christians, the supposed prevalence in the United Kingdom and Europe of “no-go” zones. These zones, according to the McCarthyite narrative, are neighborhoods or regions that have become so dominated by Muslim immigrants (and, of course, Shariah Law) that non-Muslims dare not enter them. The whole idea is a hysterical exaggeration, so much so that even Fox News has apologized for disseminating it. But Jindal has refused to downplay the no-go threat, despite being unable to point to any real examples.

If Jindal had left it there, you could have chalked it up as a momentary lapse in judgment, coupled with the typical arrogance of powerful men who are not accustomed to admitting they’re wrong. But he didn’t leave it there; he took it much further. He not only went on to flaunt his defiance on Fox News, promising he would never “tiptoe around the truth” when it came to “radical Islamic terrorism,” but also made clear that his turn to angry tribalism was no accident by grousing that he was “ready for us to stop calling ourselves hyphenated-Americans.” What connection there was between these two fearful mental spasms (it would be too charitable to call them thoughts) was unclear — until, that is, Jindal was able to get to what seemed to be his real message, which was little more than a nativist rant:

My parents came over here 40 years ago, they wanted their kids to be Americans, they love India, they love our heritage, if they wanted us to be Indians, they would have stayed in India. We also need to be teaching our kids in civics, in our schools about American Exceptionalism. We need to insist on English as our language in this country. I have nothing against anybody who wants to come here to be an American, but if people don’t want to come here to integrate and assimilate, what they’re really trying to do is set up their own culture, their communities, what they’re really trying to do is overturn our culture.

Unsurprisingly, the governor’s attempt to explicitly intertwine the conservative base’s dual fears of Muslims and immigrants was met with cheers from some of the more xenophobic and fear-stricken of conservatism’s leading lights. National Review’s Andrew McCarthy, for example, took a break from promoting torture to praise Jindal for his “Reaganesque” vision and willingness to call out the Islamic enemy within. But if Bobby Jindal wants his impending campaign for president to resonate outside the confines of National Review, his new persona is his most embarrassing miscalculation yet. Pretending to be a combination non-white Joe Arpaio and Christian Pamela Geller may do wonders for Jindal’s standing among the religious fundamentalists in the GOP, but to those of us who think America has more serious concerns than creeping Shariah, it makes him look like a fool. At best.
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...................................................................................................................................................................COMMENTS:* It is much more than a slap in Obama's face; it is blatant disrespect of the office of the presidency. Par for the course for republicans though, they never respect the office when a republican is not in it.* I don't think anyone is afraid of what he is going to say as most people know it will not change anyone's mind. What we do not like is the fact of how he got there. He is being invited solely to try to embarrass our President and our country.* Bringing a Foreign Minister to the Senate is good for the republicans. Yet they cannot work with our President for anything necessary and needed for Americans.
...................................................................................................................................................................An Open Letter to Speaker John Boehner
By Tal Schneider, January 29, 2015

Dear Mr. Speaker,

This letter is about the invitation you extended to my Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to address a joint Session of Congress a mere two weeks before the Israeli elections in March. I read your invitation and saw your tweet and immediately wondered why you had decided to involve yourself in our electoral process.

About 6,000 miles separate you, in your elevated Washington, D.C. office, from us, here in Israel, but the distance does not annul our will, aspirations or the right to make decisions.

It appears to me that your principal aim in inviting Netanyahu was to attack President Obama politically, a tactic that I, having covered politics for many years, including a long stint as Ma'ariv's Washington correspondent (when I also covered you, though we've never met) can appreciate. You went for Obama's jugular, not to say spat on him.

But at the same time you are crudely interfering in our affairs -- 9 million citizens who are not the 51st state of the United States. We here in our special and volatile place in the Middle East don't particularly want you to step in and set our public agenda.

The person who chose to call elections 34 months ahead of the end of his term is our Prime Minster, whom we elected a mere 24 months before.

Netanyahu wasn't able to agree with his Finance Minister, Yair Lapid, about a 0 percent VAT Bill, and he dismissed Lapid plus five other ministers while calling for elections.

Mr. Boehner, Israel is undergoing such a severe housing crisis such that people feel they have no recourse, and the Finance Minister attempted to find a solution to the problem, albeit in a clumsy and odd way. Netanyahu at first agreed, then disagreed, in short zigzagged, and Israeli citizens are furious that in six years in office he has been unable to restrain galloping housing and cost-of-living prices. Did you know that going to the grocery store is much, much more expensive in Tel Aviv than it is in America?

Despite the fact that Netanyahu wants to talk about Iran and terror 90 percent of the time, polls here, in our little Zionist country, show that people are actually concerned about how they will make it to the end of the month. A big social justice movement took over our streets a few years ago and Netanyahu promised to help the simple people, a promise he has failed to keep.

And then you show up, with a crassness I don't remember, and shove Netanyahu's Congressional address on Iran and extremist Islam onto our public agenda, despite the fact that Iran deadlines have come and gone for years now. Who knows this better than I, who has covered it for years?

In truth, what do you care? You come here on expensive junkets, stay -- I'm sure -- at top hotels, without so much as a thought for the difficulties faced by the chauffeur driving you or for the salary of the guard at the hotel's entrance. Why don't you speak sometime with the housekeepers or the reception desk clerks and try to understand why Israelis can't stand to hear the word "Iran" again?

So now that you have become Netanyahu's cheerleader (you know you'll make an appearance in his campaign ads, right?) and you're pleased that you managed to give Obama a black eye or embarrass the Democratic Party, I hope you receive this letter in which I want simply to deliver a message about an aspect you may have preferred to ignore: you are interfering with our democratic process in a blunt, unforgivable manner. I hope that our future leaders, whoever they may be, won't forget it.
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...................................................................................................................................................................COMMENTS:* Isn't it fun listening to the Huckster lecturing everyone on sexual morality. This is a man who brags about his friendship with Ted Nugent. He even plays a mean bass onstage with Nugent while they belt out Cat Scratch Fever, celebrating sex with underage children. * But as I've said before, there's a crucial difference. Ted Nugent is a white man celebrating his patriarchal right to have sex with passive but compliant females. Beyonce is a woman of color flaunting her own sexuality. See the problem?* How can Obama let his kids listen to the music of Beyoncé? The same way that Catholics can go to mass in a church that shelters pedophiles or that Protestants can go to church and listen to pastors who are adulterers and thieves. Seems to me that Beyoncé's music is much less of a factor in the children's lives then being in the company of felons. Beyoncé hasn't done anything wrong. Huckabee is just selling books. That really tells you a lot about the man.
...................................................................................................................................................................Evangelicals’ racist “purity” culture: What’s really behind Huckabee’s Beyoncé slur

When Mike Huckabee suggested that Jay Z was a pimp, he was tapping into an ugly history – and, likely, on purpose

By Dianna Anderson, January 31, 2015

In an interview promoting his recent book about American Christian political identity, Mike Huckabee commented that he doesn’t understand how Barack and Michelle Obama let their daughters listen to Beyoncé. He told ABC that he doesn’t think Beyoncé is wholesome, referring to Biblical ideas about holiness, saying, “what you put into your brain is also important, as well as what you put into your body.” Huckabee, a white man, seems to take particular focus on Beyoncé, stating in his book that it seems her husband, Jay Z, has crossed the line from husband to pimp in “sexually exploiting her body.”

I want you to hold that moment in your head for a minute – a white man calling a black man a “pimp” and criticizing a black female singer for being too sexual in her music. Let’s talk about history.

In the Oscar-nominated movie “Selma,” there’s a particularly poignant moment when clergy and people of faith from across the country respond to the call to come march in Selma, Alabama. Ministers and clergy travel to the small town that is the center of a voting rights conflict, and get in line behind Martin Luther King, Jr., Andrew Young and John Lewis as they march to the end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Route 80. These clergymen and -women did this knowing the stance they were taking was a risky one – one Unitarian Univeralist minister named James Reeb would later be killed by a white mob who considered him a traitor to the white race.

Just over a century before these moments portrayed in the movie, Huckabee’s own Southern Baptist Convention was born. This denomination, which has grown to nearly 16 million members, was founded in a historical break from Northern Baptists in 1845 – over a question of slaveholding. In the South of Dr. King and Fr. James Reeb, the Southern Baptist Convention was a main portion of the white opposition to the black civil rights movement. Leaders have acknowledged, time and again, that their denomination stood on the wrong side of history.

But even as Ferguson overtakes the media and the historic marches from Selma to Montgomery are chronicled in a film many are calling the best of the year, the SBC remains relatively silent on issues of race. The denomination is still, by and large, made of a powerful political bloc of white voters who self-identify as evangelical. The SBC is not only the largest Protestant denomination, but it is also the largest group of self-identified evangelicals in the United States – a group that encompasses about one third of the American Christian population.

“Evangelical,” as an identity, is separate from the historical nature of the Southern Baptist Convention, though their theologies and histories are tied together and, in many ways, are nearly inextricable from each other. But evangelical, as a political and social identity, has a much shorter history than the Southern Baptists. The sanitized story that you’ll hear from most evangelicals is that, following the 1973 decision of Roe v. Wade, evangelicals were moved away from their previous apolitical identity toward protecting the unborn. Much of the evangelical identity, even today, is centered on pro-life issues and pushing for political protection of fetuses. And this is an identity Huckabee embraces as a former pastor and current evangelical thought leader.

But Evangelicalism actually dates back to well before Roe v. Wade – indeed, about a decade before, right around the time Martin Luther King, Jr., was becoming a national figure. The historical white religious fear of the black man is a well-documented phenomenon. After all, Emmett Till was murdered for the supposed crime of whistling at a white woman. Social hygienists in the early 1920s created sexual health education not out of a public health concern, but because upper-class white women were beginning to mirror the supposed sexual habits of lower-class people of color. The pearl-clutching fear over miscegenation was still in the minds of evangelicals as they began to stand up as a political identity in the early 1960s.

The landmark decision of Loving v. Virginia – the interracial marriage court case of 1967 – spurred yet more white fear over the loss of control over white women in particular. This fear coincided with the rise of second-wave feminism – which would eventually lead to Roe v. Wade. All this tumult threw the evangelicals into a political fervor – the way of life they had established for themselves in the two short decades since the end of World War II was coming to an end. Life in the U.S. was, in a word, unstable. This change didn’t sit well with evangelical leaders.

The black church and the white church in America have always existed as separate, simultaneous entities. During the days of slavery, white slaveholders recognized the power of the black church as a place to plot revolt, and therefore began forcing their slaves to attend their white churches with them. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a reverend and famously talked just as much about God’s will as he did the politics of the day. Evangelicals, then, found a way to respond to the civil rights crisis by injecting their own take on scripture and race into the discussion.

Through this narrative, the purity movement as we know it today developed – full of True Love Waiting and abstinence-only education and purity balls. The threat of black men to white women’s purity is still a ghoulish nightmare in the minds of white evangelicals of the 1980s, when Falwell’s Moral Majority rose to power and when Huckabee was most active as a pastor in Arkansas. The cultural wars, imbued with the memory of the civil rights battle just a few years before, were the training ground for Huckabee’s pastoral and theological thinking.

And it is in this context that Huckabee can call a multimillionaire black musician a prostitute and a sexual object without his base of white evangelicals batting an eye. It is this history – a history of Evangelicalism founded in racial tensions and racist fear over the sexuality of black people – that colors Huckabee’s comments to make them seem entirely reasonable to an audience of white evangelicals primed to gobble them up. Huckabee’s comments, indeed, are carefully calculated dogwhistles to his base, imbued with the racist history of the political evangelical identity.
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Friday, January 30, 2015

...................................................................................................................................................................COMMENTS:* and that is precisely the point. One man one vote cannot exist where money is speech. The answer seems very evident remove the money and remove the inrquity. Ask yourself the question.....why would anyone spend 889 million on an election cycle.........and expect nothing in return.........* Actually, maybe there should be a standard deduction/tax credit for voting.... Vote in an election and take $100 off bottom line taxes, regardless of income and schedule A not required for deduction (short form includes it).
...................................................................................................................................................................Koch spending goal lit a flame, Dems say
By Tarini Parti, January 30, 2015

In the City of Brotherly Love, there was none for the Koch brothers among Democratic lawmakers huddled here for their retreat.

Just a few days after the Koch network’s wealthy GOP donors met in the California desert to discuss their plans to spend $889 million over the next two years, Democratic lawmakers received new polling data from White House adviser David Simas in a closed-door meeting Wednesday night that Democrats could use to form a more effective narrative against the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch and other Republican donors. The polling presentations come as Democrats grapple with creating a unified message for 2016 — a major criticism of their disastrous performance in the recent midterms.

“One of the top testing issues for the middle-class voters is their anger at the Tax Code for giving wealthy people like the Koch brothers loopholes and shelters,” said Rep. Steve Israel, the new chairman of the House Democrats’ messaging arm, in an interview with POLITICO, adding that the eye-popping Koch network spending number has given Democrats “a sense of resolve.”

“That issue polls very powerfully,” said Israel, who served as chairman of the House Democrats’ campaign committee in 2014. “It fits directly into our message that one party is trying to protect the middle class, and the other is spending whatever it must to dismantle the middle class. The more relentless [the Kochs] are, the more negative a brand we will make them.”

The spending projections from the Koch network has been a topic of discussion among members at the retreat, but rather than nervousness, “it is generating a combination of anger and determination,” said Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.), a leading advocate of campaign finance reform. “There’s no question that it’s a daunting scenario that looms before us. But on the other hand, it’s deeply offensive not just to the public, but to us when you’re serving the public this notion that you can buy democracy with million dollar checks in a backroom.”

Before Democrats worked on fine-tuning their messaging in Philadelphia, House and Senate Democratic leadership met earlier this week with officials from opposition research group American Bridge 21st Century Foundation, which last year launched a research-and-communications war room targeting the Koch brothers. The group is pushing members of Congress and other Democratic groups to centralize a message that connects the Kochs to specific issues.

American Bridge also this week invited Democratic groups, including unions, EMILY’s List, Planned Parenthood and the Center for American Progress, to a “briefing and planning meeting on Charles and David Koch’s expansive — and secretive — political network.”

“The Koch Brothers spent more than $290 million in 2014 to elect extreme, far right Republicans to the House and Senate,” reads the invitation to the event titled, “Buying an Election: A Meeting and Briefing on Strategy to Counter the Koch Brothers Political Network,” which was obtained by POLITICO. “They’ve already announced their plan to spend a staggering $889 million to buy the White House in 2016. These two shadowy billionaires are trying to buy our government so they can roll back environmental protections, undermine workers’ rights and cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires like themselves.”

“American Bridge has been compiling research and tracing the shadowy network the Kochs have built to promote policies that will make them richer and bankrupt the middle class as part of a Koch rapid response hub we launched last cycle,” it says. “We hope you’ll join us for a discussion of the latest developments in the Koch Brothers’ political network and our plans and yours to counter them over the next two years.”

The invitation for the event comes after David Brock, founder and chairman of the group, circulated a memo, “Dear Koch Brothers: We Aren’t Going Anywhere.” It explained why Democrats should continue to target the Kochs even though they lost big in 2014 in the races in which they used the brothers in their messaging.

Besides just messaging, Democrats are hoping the $889 million figure — part of which will be steered toward academic programs and policy research— will rally grass-roots donors via online fundraising and push major donors to open their checkbooks.

Rep. Ben Ray Luján, the new chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, touted the Democrats’ online fundraising efforts, saying in an interview that Democrats are “going to have millions of small donors matching the Koch brothers in online fundraising” and “a more excited electorate” in 2016.

“The Koch brothers just lit a flame under millions of Democratic small donors and grass-roots activists, and there’s no doubt Democrats will use this now until Election Day,” said Anne Lewis, a top Democratic fundraiser. “Online donors are the great equalizer and right now Democrats simply have more of them.”

Outside groups also have jumped on the Koch networks’ spending plans to generate email fundraising pleas. In an email with the subject line, “Oh hell — Kochs pledge $889 million for 2016 fight,” Democratic-leaning environmental group, the League of Conservation Voters told supporters: “It’s the kind of big money that hovers ominously in the background as we engage in fights right now with Big Oil and the Koch brothers on critical environmental decisions facing this country.”

The Koch networks’ spending numbers could also help bring big donors back on board, after the targeting strategy failed in 2014.

Mel Heifetz, a major Democratic donor, said in an email the Koch network’s plans make him nervous, but give more of a reason for the party to target it than in the past. “I think it becomes more obvious with each mention of the amount that the Koch brothers are buying the next election,” he said.

Heifetz has given $1.2 million to Democratic campaigns and groups that disclose their contributions in the past two cycles.

But a spokesman for the Koch’s political operation said the Democrats’ new messaging efforts will not yield results any different from 2014.

“Democrats’ past attempts to divide America by demonizing job creators didn’t work too well,” said James Davis, spokesman for Freedom Partners. “Despite their rhetoric, over the last six years, their big government policies have expanded the gap between the rich and poor in our country and the middle class has carried most of the burden. So while they’re building another campaign on baseless personal attacks, we’ll stay focused on advancing policies that improve lives and increase prosperity for all Americans.”

Democratic leadership here didn’t criticize the Kochs at a news conference by name, unlike Sen. Harry Reid, who took to the Senate floor to bash the brothers often last year.

Instead, the top two House Democrats — Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Steny Hoyer — repeatedly criticized the Republicans for working for the “high rollers” and the “well-connected,” stressing that making that connection to voters will be a priority for them. Later in an interview with POLITICO, Hoyer said “the Koch brothers are the clearest example of people with very great wealth and very great special interests” whom Democrats can use to help voters “make an informed judgment of who is for me and who is not.”

Pelosi also attributed the flood of money on the airwaves for “misrepresenting” the Democrats’ message and keeping voters at home in 2014. “The elections are more challenging because so much money comes in to suffocate the airwaves with misrepresentations and really just deters people from coming to the polls,” she told reporters.

“So part of our challenge in the last election was that only one-third of the electorate voted. The point is that we have to reach people so when they know the distinction they will vote accordingly.”
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...................................................................................................................................................................Bernie Sanders is right to be outraged
By Dana Milbank, January 30, 2015Bernie Sanders is in his natural state – of agitation.

It’s just 9 a.m., but the socialist senator, contemplating a presidential run as a Democrat or as a populist independent, is red in the face and his white hair askew. In a conference room at The Washington Post, he’s raising his voice, thumping his index finger on the table and gesturing so wildly that his hand comes within inches of political reporter Karen Tumulty’s face.

“We are living in the United States right now at a time when the top one-tenth of 1 percent own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent,” the Vermont lawmaker says in his native Brooklyn accent.

“One family, the Walton family of Wal-Mart, owns by itself more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of the American people.”

And then there are the Kochs, “the second-wealthiest family in America, worth $85 billion ... who are now prepared to buy the United States government.”

“You’re looking at the undermining of American democracy, okay?”

Okay, okay, okay. I remark on his prodigious indignation.

“It’s early in the morning,” Sanders boasts. “Catch me later in the afternoon.”

The real outrage, though, is that so few people share his fury.

There’s widespread agreement about the problem – that inequality is as bad as it has been in America since the crash of ’29. Even Republican leaders are talking about it (their solution, alas, is a tax system with even more breaks for the wealthy.) But there’s no sign yet of the mass anger that could turn into a political movement.

This is the week we would have seen it. As my colleague Matea Gold reported, the Koch brothers and their fundraising network plan to spend $889 million on the 2016 race. That sort of brazen bid to buy an election should come with naming rights – perhaps the Charles G. and David H. Koch White House, to match the Charles G. and David H. Koch United States Senate they financed in 2014. A half-dozen of those whose new Senate seats were acquired with Koch money attended a Koch confab in Palm Springs over the weekend to thank their patrons.

But the news elicited no more outrage than did previous acquisitions of the House of Representatives (a.k.a. Citi Field). “The anger is there,” Sanders says, but “it’s an anger that turns into saying, ‘Go to hell, I’m not going to participate in your charade. I’m not voting.’ So it’s a weird kind of anger. It’s not people getting out in the streets ... We’re at the stage of demoralization.”

That leaves Sanders’s populist candidacy in an awkward place. He can mount a symbolic primary campaign against Hillary Clinton that goes nowhere. “Can you mobilize people? Can you tap the anger that’s out there?” Sanders asks rhetorically. “The answer is — you know what? — I don’t exactly know that we can.”

Or he can run as an independent and perhaps take enough votes in a general election to be a spoiler. But he doesn’t seem inclined to be a Ralph Nader, who doomed Al Gore in 2000 and saw no difference between the two parties. “There is a difference,” says Sanders, who caucuses with Senate Democrats.

Sanders faults President Obama for the current demoralization. “I think he had a moment in history to do what President Roosevelt did in 1932,” he says. “He had the opportunity to say to the American people, ‘Look, millions of people have lost jobs ... [and] it’s because of what JP Morgan did, it’s because of what Morgan Stanley did, what Goldman Sachs did.”

“Is that moment today?” Sanders continues. “No. ... I think he lost that extraordinary opportunity.” Democrats remain “too tepid” in taking on big money, and Clinton won’t be “as bold as she needs to be.”

Clinton comes from the corporate wing of the party. Though there are nascent signs of a tea party of the left emerging, no candidate represents it. Sanders, 73, is charismatically challenged, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who has more flair, doesn’t appear to be contemplating a run. Even if she did, the primaries are so dominated by big money that it’s not clear Warren could pose a viable challenge to Clinton.

No wonder Sanders is so agitated. “You have to take on the Koch brothers and you have to take on Wall Street and you have to take on the billionaires,” he says, gesticulating madly and fuming about the “oligarchy” running government. “Not to get you too nervous,” he says, but “I think you need a political revolution.”As Sanders is learning, you can’t have a populist revolution without people.
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Over the past year, a number of Republican lawmakers have gravitated to the claim that there is a central flaw in President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act. Jumping aboard a lawsuit that has now made its way to the Supreme Court, they argue that a close reading of the bill prohibits the federal government from giving subsidies to those who purchase health insurance on exchanges that are run by the federal government, of which there are 34.

The question is whether this embrace of the lawsuit represents an epiphany or crass political opportunism. Because not long ago, many of these Republicans were publicly assuming the subsidies they now question were available to everyone, regardless of the exchange on which they shopped.

An August 2013 letter to then-Health and Human Service Secretary Kathleen Sebelius shows how Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) made this exact shift. Back then, Ryan declared these subsidies would cost taxpayers more than $1 trillion -- an amount only possible if they were available nationally, not just in the 15 state-run exchanges in place at the time.

This acknowledgment of the Affordable Care Act tax credits for low- and middle-income households in every state contradicts a brief Ryan and 14 other GOP lawmakers filed to the Supreme Court last month. That document states, “The plain text of the ACA reflects a specific choice by Congress to make health insurance premium subsidies available only to those who purchase insurance from ‘an Exchange established by the State.’”

In March, the Supreme Court will take up a case called King v. Burwell, which asserts that those words mean subsidies can go only to residents of states that created their own exchanges under the law, and not in states that allowed the federal government to do so. The lawsuit doesn’t stop there, because it also claims Congress intended this to be the case, an argument vehemently disputed by the Obama administration and the congressional Democrats who wrote the law. The high court is expected to rule in June.

Republican lawmakers are jumping aboard the Obamacare lawsuit bandwagon in the meantime. The problem with the mainstream Republican adoption of the claim that Congress meant to deny subsidies to consumers using federally run exchanges is that Republicans didn’t express that view during the congressional debate in 2009 and 2010, nor in the time that followed -- until the chances increased that the suit would succeed.

In the letter Ryan sent to Sebelius when he was Budget Committee chairman in 2013, which was part of a number of documents obtained through a Freedom Of Information Act request to the Department of Health and Human Services, he wrote:

The committee has many questions about how this law is being implemented. Of particular interest is how the federal exchange subsidies, with an estimated gross cost of more than $1 trillion, will be managed, administered, and verified.

Ryan made a similar assumption during a hearing in March 2010, a few days after Obama enacted the Affordable Care Act, Talking Points Memo reported this month. At the time, Ryan described the subsidies as available to “just about everybody in this country, people making less than $100,000.”

Brendan Buck, a spokesman for Ryan, did not say when or why the Ways and Means Committee chairman changed his views on the meaning of the Affordable Care Act. Instead, he noted that the congressman was operating off of CBO numbers when he wrote his August 2013 letter, and questioned why such material was being resurfaced now.

"The increasingly half-baked 'evidence' that defenders of the law are citing is revealing quite a sense of rising panic that Obamacare is in real trouble," said Buck.

While the King lawsuit does, indeed, place Obamacare and millions of health insurance consumers in real trouble, the Republican argument about congressional intent has trouble of its own.

Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wy.) is another of the 15 Republican lawmakers whose brief to the Supreme Court declares subsidies were only meant for state-run exchanges. But in 2011, Barrasso had a different point of view,Salon reported Tuesday.

At a press conference touting legislation that would have allowed states to opt out of Affordable Care Act insurance regulations, Barrasso stated the subsidies in question would be provided no matter what a state did. Taxpayers are “not going to give up that right to have an opportunity to use that money,” he said.

That same year, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who was chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, issued a report titled "Uncovering the True Impact of the Obamacare Tax Credits." In the footnotes of that report, he and his staff adopted the argument that Obamacare defenders now use to defend the legality of sending subsidies to all eligible recipients, regardless of what exchange they shop on.

"State health insurance exchanges will be set either by the state or by the federal government if a states refuses to set up its own exchange," the footnote reads. "The exchanges are basically portals where individuals can purchase health insurance. Many individuals who purchase insurance through an exchange will qualify for a tax credit."

Also in 2011, Republicans unanimously supported a bill using subsidy funding to pay for a change in tax law. Doing so explicitly assumed those tax credits were national, as The New Republic reported last week.

An estimated 10 million people would lose their health coverage in absence of the subsidies received by more than 85 percent of exchange enrollees. And the abrupt departure of that many people from the insurance pools in those states would destabilize those markets, jeopardizing coverage for those who could still afford it, and the ability of insurers to continue operating in these states.

...................................................................................................................................................................COMMENTS:* I never met the man, and I never will. So I can't say what sort of man he is one on one. However, he built his wealth first by inheritance, then by vulture capitalism. He demonstrated repeatedly that he was oblivious to the problems of most Americans. Maybe he's a great guy to spend time with, but he'll not be missed as a presidential candidate by people in the 99%.* The guy is pretty pathetic... I mean, just another rich guy who wants to be president because "HE WANTS TO"... Here's the big problem here... There are way too many people out there who WANT TO be president strictly to stroke their own flippin' egos... If you can't articulate what you have to offer the country then why in the world should the country let you become president... That's why Romney lost in 2012 and that's why almost the entire field of Republicans out there who WANT TO become president in 2016 will lose, too... And I'm not too sure about Hillary either... Seems the only possible candidate out there who has some thing to offer the country doesn't WANT TO be president and that is Elizabeth Warren... The rest, with the exception of Jim Webb, are either owned by the Kochs or ego trippers... * I was not insulted since not being a Republican there was no chance I would vote for Mr. Romney to begin with. I tuned him out years ago as I have quite a few of the "maybe" candidates. Several of them just seem to toss out their "possibility" of running at a time when they have a new book out they are selling, or a television/radio show that can benefit from a ratings bump or need to book some additional speaking engagements for additional dollars. I am keeping an eye out for candidates that will actually state how they really feel, what they truly stand for day in and day out. Those are the ones I will research thoroughly and decide whether to vote for. It is still a bit early for any type of intelligent decision making on any candidate.
...................................................................................................................................................................Romney insults voters one last time
By Stephen Stromberg, January 30, 2015

The country let out a collective “thank God” — or, in Utah, a “thank gosh” — on Friday when Mitt Romney said he would not run for president a third time. He went out as he went in — a decent man and an accomplished manager who serially insults voters.

The case for Romney was always premised on the notion that, despite his desperate attempts to reflect the views of 50 percent-plus-one voters back at them, he would quit this nonsense in the Oval Office, applying his intelligence and businesslike competence rather than behaving like an ideologue or governing by focus group. Naturally, GOP ideologues didn’t trust him. But neither did a lot of other people who had reason to wonder if, like his campaigns, his presidency would have been driven by constant and brazen political calculation.

Perhaps Romney felt as though his developing 2016 message was more authentically Mitt. But he had already strained the credulity of all but the most devoted Romneyites. He should have taken the goodwill he generated after his unsuccessful 2012 run and become a GOP elder statesman. Instead, he had to inflame the political world one last time over the past few weeks with characteristically awkward hints of another run. Whether he was serious about performing another political shape-shift or he simply wanted to flex his ego, the result is the same: He reminded Americans of why he was a flawed candidate.

That’s a shame. Romney is an otherwise accomplished man and father who was at times unfairly savaged during the 2012 campaign. But, as ever, his own worst enemy is himself.
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Thursday, January 29, 2015

...................................................................................................................................................................Mitt Romney and political ‘authenticity’
By Gregg Sargent, January 27, 2015

I’m going to defend Romney here, not to be all Slate-pitchy (i.e. contrarian), but because this raises some interesting larger points. First of all, that line — and it’s a very good line! — doesn’t come from Romney. It comes from Rucker. Here it is in context:

If he runs again in 2016, Romney is determined to re-brand himself as authentic, warts and all, and central to that mission is making public what for so long he kept private. He rarely discussed his religious beliefs and practices in his failed 2008 and 2012 races, often confronting suspicion and bigotry with silence as his political consultants urged him to play down his Mormonism.

Now, Romney speaks openly about his service as a lay pastor in the Mormon church; recites Scripture to audiences; muses about salvation and the prophet; urges students to marry young and “have a quiver full of kids”; and even cracks jokes about Joseph Smith’s polygamy.

So, what this really means is that Romney is going to strive to be less scripted in general — less worried about showcasing his “warts” — but with a particular emphasis on his Mormon faith.

Romney’s more transparent Mormonism may be new. As detailed in Double Down, his 2012 advisers were very worried about emphasizing what they called The Mormon Thing — or TMT, for short — because they thought it might hurt with evangelicals in GOP primaries. So it’ll be interesting to see how it plays this time around.

But this whole notion that we never got to see “the real Romney” because he was too scripted is at odds with what actually happened in 2012. Romney’s unscripted moments were among those that got him in the most trouble. In some cases, this was simply not fair. There was the time he claimed, “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.” Democrats and reporters pounced, but he was really arguing that he liked being able to replace his health insurance when he judged it sub-par. Romney was trying to be funny and engaging — unscripted. But it came out in a way that triggered the unforgiving iron rule of political “gaffes,” which is that if an off-the-cuff quote dovetails with what has already been determined to be a candidate’s “weakness,” than torturing that quote into still more confirmation of that weakness is perfectly acceptable.

The problem wasn’t that Romney failed to put enough effort into being himself. It’s that he didn’t know how to do that without triggering the media pile-on gaffe rule.

Romney also got deservedly pilloried for unscripted moments, such as when he got caught on video delivering his “47 percent” remarks. It’s worth distinguishing between an unscripted moment that triggers unfair gaffe-athons and one that appears to reveal what a candidate really thinks. True, Romney’s “47 percent” comments — with their strange jumble of right-wing slogans and amorphous bugaboos — perhaps made him sound more sneeringly dismissive of life’s losers and takers than he really is. But his willingness to generalize about those who are dependent on government in so many different ways, and for so many different reasons, did seem to reveal a genuinely held philosophical worldview.

As it happens, the Romney team also plans to address perceptions of Romney’s lack of compassion for the less fortunate by revealing more of his authentically held values. From Rucker’s piece:

“In spite of the comments about the ‘47 percent,’ he now talks about lifting the poor,” said friend Fraser Bullock, referring to Romney’s 2012 remarks about people dependent on government. “That’s something he’s done his whole life, but he’s done it quietly, ministering his faith and helping people who are struggling with this issue or that issue. That was all hidden last time.”

Hmmm. But remember, in 2012, Romney’s policy proposals, which appeared to reflect his actual worldview about government, were seen by majorities as being more favorable to the wealthy. I don’t have any idea whether displaying Romney’s compassion and charity would be enough to offset that in a general election (presuming he makes it that far). And though Romney is making new and ambitious rhetorical nods towards poverty and inequality, I don’t have any idea whether he’s going to offer a more, er, authentic agenda for combating those things this time.

But that might be a better place to start than with an elaborate plan to showcase a personal, faith-driven predilection towards helping the poor. Sure, charisma, values, and biography matter. But the process by which the political gods — which is to say, the political press corps — determine whether a candidate is “authentic” or revealing his or her “real” character can be arbitrary, cruel, unpredictable, and often self-contradictory. Remember how Al Gore was relentlessly pilloried for simultaneously being stiff and inauthentic and for revealing his genuinely supercilious character?

Today Romney is the one who is on the receiving end of this process. Because it’s been decided that his “weakness” in 2012 was his in-authenticity and failure to show his “real” values, it’s a self-reinforcing joke that he self-consciously plans to be more “authentic” this time. But the real problem here is this notion of “authenticity” as a political value to aspire to. It’s a sucker’s game. A candidate’s policies and actual worldview should matter far more.
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All across the United States, Comcast is propping up a puppet regime of local politicians ready to do its bidding

By Robert X. Cringely, January 29, 2015

I’ve been binge-watching "The West Wing" so hard I fell into a coma. The InfoWorld SWAT team had to kick down my door and Taser me back to consciousness. Even newly lucid, I miss my glimpse into the lives of this great nation’s politico-sociopathic complex. Not the White House kind -- I’d need to, like, know stuff for that gig. I’m more attracted to state- and municipal-level gigs.

Do little, bow and scrape for money, smile for the camera, rinse and repeat. Every once in a while take a soft stand on an issue, have a flunky write a meaningless release you can leak to the press, and maybe get your name on safely inscrutable legislation yet another flunky wrote for you. Throw a few buckets of scotch in there and I’m hot-tubbing in heaven.

I mean, writing these posts is so hard (cue high-pitched whine). Wouldn’t it be nice if I could get someone else to write them while I get byline credit? Therein lies what’s frying my clams on this fine day. Apparently, if I were a low-level pol and didn’t mind selling my self-respect for a dirty nickel, I could get someone else to write these posts and let me sign them ... as long as I’m OK with Comcast doing the writing.

Comcast seeds the Astroturf from the ground up

According to depressing but not at all shocking news that came out earlier this week, low- and midlevel politicians all over this great and bribable nation are sending letters to the FCC expressing deep and not at all financially influenced support for the unholy union that is the Comcast and Time Warner Cable merger. That already makes me want to take a bath with my toaster, but here's the real kicker: Neither these jokers nor the drunken monkeys manning their PR desks could be bothered writing the letters themselves. Instead, they had Comcast do it.

Mayor Jere Wood of Roswell, Ga., is a prominent figure in this drama. Last August he allegedly sent a letter to the FCC sharing his oh-so-genuine excitement about the proposed merger and assuring Mr. Wheeler that the residents of Roswell simply adored Comcast and would freely deliver wine and backrubs to their executives if it would help move the merger along. That sounds great -- only Wood didn’t write the letter.

Purportedly, a “vice president of external affairs” at Comcast authored the work and sent it to Wood's office. Wood stopped wrestling with that afternoon’s sheet meat long enough to add a “thanks a bunch” sentence, print it on official city letterhead, and sign his name. I’m amazed the feckless zombies on his staff could work up enough collective saliva to moisten the stamp.

The Comcast lobby engine is belching forth these missives because the TWC merger is at the tail end of its federal review process. To help the travesty along, Comcast has the yams to refer to these letters as evidence of deep grassroots support for the merger from John Q. Public as ostensibly represented by their local Boss Hogg leadership.

The Comcast army, from coast to coast

It can do that because Wood isn’t alone. There are others – many others. For example, a letter supposedly written by an official from the metropolis of Jupiter, Fla., was actually penned by Comcast, then polished by a former FCC exec named Rosemary Harold who now practices telecom law (gnash teeth, bang head, dent wall) in Washington, D.C.

Oregon Secretary of State Kate Brown is another alleged FCC pen pal who supports the monster-merger. She too sent a “love it” letter, and it too was almost entirely written for her by a Comcast employee. Like Wood, Brown padded it with a few sentences, stamped it with the Oregon seal, and sent it to Wheeler’s inbox.

Why is Comcast going to the trouble of ghostwriting letters for a bunch of municipal baby-kissers? Simple: In order for the merger to be approved by the FCC, Comcast and TWC need to demonstrate it’s in the best interest of the public. Sure, that’s kind of like Bill Belichick saying underinflated footballs were in the best interests of the Colts, but this is Washington -- logic and evidence are antithetical or at least irrelevant. What better way to land the impression of public support than by dumping a few bulging mailbags of sticky mash notes on the FCC’s doorstep from a legion of small-town politicians Comcast can buy wholesale?

Lazy, loathsome -- and legal

Is this crap illegal? Frighteningly, despairingly, painfully, no. Is it rare? Not even close; we’re talking mainstream according to the FCC. Though all the politicians listed here (and others according to the source) have a history of accepting Comcast campaign funding, there’s nothing on the books prohibiting this kind of low tripe as long as the honorable public servant in question has the ability to alter the letter as they see fit before signing their Hancocks.

But Comcast knows it doesn’t need to worry about edits. That’s too much effort to expect from our elected officials. Meaningful edits would require some semblance of understanding, which would mean (gasp!) work. Then there’s the 20 minutes it would take to write a draft, to say nothing of the epic moral heroism needed to stand on two feet and declare what’s best for your constituency, not your reelection coffers.

I know telecom law doesn’t exactly lift voters’ skirts, and if they’re unhappy it’s more likely that Bangalore Steve from Comcast customer support will have to suffer their griping, but damn, guys. Forget the letter of the law; if you can’t see something rancid in this transaction, you should be on a psychiatrist’s couch, not sitting in public office.
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...................................................................................................................................................................Study: Blame men for political gridlockWomen may be better at compromise
By University of Kansas, January 29, 2015

During the political gridlock that led to the 2013 federal government shutdown, the leading voices for compromise were the handful of female U.S. senators -- only 20 percent of the overall legislative body.

"I don't think it's a coincidence that women were so heavily involved in trying to end this stalemate," Maine Sen. Susan Collins said in the New York Times. "Although we span the ideological spectrum, we are used to working together in a collaborative way."

Was Collins correct? Would Congress be less dysfunctional if it consisted of 80 percent women instead of men?

It's likely, according to a new study co-authored by a University of Kansas researcher.

"One implication is that female legislators might talk about politics and deliberately engage the other party more than their male colleagues," said Patrick Miller, a KU assistant professor of political science. "That might have some effects on the kind of legislative environment we have. Maybe if we have more women in office, you'd have more communication, less fighting, and perhaps more legislating and less gridlock."

The researchers found that men in survey and experimental data were more likely than women to avoid cross-party political discussion, to judge political arguments based solely on what party is advancing them, and to form strong political opinions about the opposite party's positions without actually listening to the other side's reasoning.

"Male Democrats and Republicans more than female partisans expect interacting with the other party to be an unpleasant, conflictual, anxious, anger-filled experience," Miller said. "So as a result, they talk about politics with people in the other party less so than women."

The results of the study are based on survey data from the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study conducted nationwide and 2014 experimental results involving KU undergraduate students. Miller said the research is the first to apply the psychological idea of intergroup anxiety into political science.

Miller and co-author Pamela Johnston Conover, a political science professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, published their findings recently in "Why Partisan Warriors Don't Listen: The Gendered Dynamics of Intergroup Anxiety and Partisan Conflict" in the Journal "Politics, Groups, and Identities."

"Male partisans are more likely to reject information, to reject opinions that come from the other party without engaging that information," Miller said. "Just because they hear that an argument comes from the other party they think about that information less. Yet they are more likely to reject that information strongly. In essence, male partisans are forming strong opinions that create polarization and conflict on less information than women."

Miller said these findings fit with psychological research known as the "male warrior argument" that focuses on men being hard-wired to fight.

"It's not that women don't have any of those feelings. It's just that they have fewer of them," he said. "We found these interesting patterns such as being exposed to competitive elections makes you more hesitant to discuss politics and engage with the other side. So our elections divide us from each other as citizens rather than encourage us to discuss important political issues."

This idea is important, the study's authors said, because the act of listening to political opponents is a central tenet in the proper functioning of a deliberative democracy.

However, because their data dealt with responses from voters instead of elected officials, Miller said it presents another implication other than the function or potential dysfunction of a legislative body.

"Citizens also carry some burden for the problems that we have in politics today," he said. "We very readily condemn all the problems we find in Washington. Yet, we as citizens don't think very often about the role that we have in that."

By and large, voters nominate and elect more partisan politicians, he said.

"If we're condemning politicians for the way they act in office, they might just be giving us what we are citizens are looking for," Miller said, "that partisan warrior and gridlock."
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Wednesday, January 28, 2015

...................................................................................................................................................................Why Do Judges and Politicians Flip-Flop?To investigate, Cass Sunstein and I conducted a series of surveys.
By Eric Posner, January 26, 2015

A proposal by major Senate Republicans to abolish the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees has raised many eyebrows. Just a year and a half ago, Republicans had stridently complained when Democrats abolished the filibuster for lower court judges and executive branch positions. (“These are dark days in the history of the Senate,” said Sen. Mitch McConnell.) “We’re witnessing a massive flip-flop in slow motion,” said a Democratic spokesman of the new proposal. “Democrats appreciate the vote of confidence from Republicans in the wisdom of our rules change.”

Good arguments can be made for or against the filibuster, but it’s hard to justify a flip-flop. Sen. John McCain grumbles that his colleagues show “selective amnesia” by turning on a dime. The problem boils down to trust. When senators argue about the filibuster, they appeal to the public interest, but if their position on the rule always reflects their political interests, then they are, essentially, lying. It all seems like a game.

Republicans are hardly the only party to flip-flop. Democrats themselves used the filibuster to block many of President George W. Bush’s nominees, only to reverse themselves when it was President Obama’s turn. Democrats also seem to have forgotten their Bush-era complaints about the “imperial presidency.” None of them peeped when President Obama’s military intervention in Libya violated the War Powers Act. Meanwhile, Republicans have rediscovered the dangers posed by the imperial presidency under the Obama administration after eight years of silence under Bush. In the latest round of accusations, Democrats accuse Republicans of interfering with the president’s authority over foreign affairs by inviting the Israeli prime minister to give a speech to Congress while Republicans point out that Democratic members of Congress have in the past parlayed with foreign leaders.

Flip-flopping is ubiquitous in politics, and also in law. In a single week last term, Justice Antonin Scalia joined one opinion striking down a section of the Voting Rights Act while writing a dissent from the court’s decision to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act in which he argued that judges should defer to the will of the people. Justice Anthony Kennedy argued that Congress had disregarded the interests of states in his opinion striking down the Defense of Marriage Act, but ignored states’ interests himself in another opinion expressing skepticism about a Texas affirmative action program. Meanwhile, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a dissent in the voting rights case that noted the importance of giving deference to congressional fact-finding while joining Kennedy’s opinion, which disregarded congressional fact-finding about same-sex marriage.Of course, not all flip-flops are the same, and not all accusations of flip-flopping are fair. Scalia and Kennedy could cite other reasons for their decisions. Democrats argue that they changed their position on filibustering because Republicans abused the process; Republicans have made the reverse claim. But the special pleading tends to reinforce one’s skepticism, especially given the ubiquity of flip-flopping. If Scalia, Kennedy, or Ginsburg have good reasons for their decisions, why not stick to them rather than appeal inconsistently to general norms?

Flip-flopping is so common that one might wonder why anyone pays attention to it anymore. Or why anyone believes the arguments of flip-flopping politicians and judges. A clue comes from psychology, which has documented a phenomenon known as motivated reasoning, in which people interpret the world in ways that support their own beliefs. For example, football fans of opposing teams believe that the referee is biased against their own team. Rather than acknowledge that their team might not be any good, fans blame the referee.

To investigate the role of motivated reasoning in the sort of institutional flip-flops that politicians and judges engage in, Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein and I conducted a series of surveys. In one, we asked people whether President Bush acted rightly by using a loophole to make appointments in defiance of Senate opposition. Most Republicans said he did the right thing while most Democrats said he acted wrongly. We then put Obama’s name in for Bush with a different group of respondents and asked the same question. This time the vast majority of Republicans opposed the appointments while most Democrats said he did the right thing.

We posed a similar question about use of the signing statement—Bush’s and now Obama’s controversial practice of signing a bill while stating that he will not enforce portions of it. Again, Republicans were more sympathetic to the practice when the question invoked Bush, Democrats when the question invoked Obama.

Like the football fans, most partisans see a neutral process in a favorable light if it advances their parties’ goals and in an unfavorable light if it does not. And this is true even if partisanship is not salient. We asked another group of respondents whether they supported same-sex marriage and whether they thought Congress could either mandate nationwide recognition of same-sex marriage or prohibit states from recognizing same-sex marriage. Same-sex marriage supporters were much more likely to believe that Congress could mandate it than ban it; opponents believed the opposite.

We call this phenomenon “merits bias”—a bias in favor of evaluating a rule or institution in terms of whether it advances one’s political goals. We suspect that some politicians and even judges suffer from merits bias while others cynically exploit merits bias in the general public. Many Democrats really do believe that the filibuster is justified when it blocks Republican nominees and not when it blocks Democratic nominees. And the same with Republicans. Political operatives and sophisticated observers know it’s a game, but most people don’t.

But all is not as hopeless as it might seem. While people flip-flop over ambiguous institutional norms like the filibuster and broad, unsettled constitutional questions like the power of the national government to override the states, they don’t once the questions are settled. Not even the most hardened cynics flip-flop over the rule that the president can serve only two terms, or that members of the minority party can serve on congressional committees. These rules are seen as fair as well as clear.

Flip-flopping occurs when the rules that regulate political conduct—such as whether a minority of the Senate can block a nomination—are unsettled. The problem—and here is merits bias again—is that one’s political and ideological views will color one’s idea of what is fair. And even when they don’t, one will often be more strongly motivated by one’s narrow political interest, such as winning the next election, than by fairness and the public interest.

The parties can overcome these biases through negotiation and deals, but only when they can see each other’s point of view. A useful way to do this is to don “the veil of ignorance.” Imagine that you do not know whether Republicans or Democrats will benefit, and ask yourself which rule for voting on judicial confirmations is in the national interest. You might decide on majority rule (so that the president can quickly put people in place) or a supermajority rule (to block terrible nominees). But you will at least be consistent rather than a flip-flopper. Then serious debate can begin.
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As part of the federal program, cameras on key thoroughfares take snapshots of license plates to catch smugglers and other criminals. Americans may be more carefully weighing societal benefits versus privacy for such programs.

By Patrik Jonsson, January 27, 2015

US drivers, beware: You’re probably on the government’s candid camera.

Revelations that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is building a massive highway license-plate-camera program to spy on millions of unwitting drivers to catch a few smugglers, rapists, and kidnappers has riled civil liberties groups.

The news, as reported by The Wall Street Journal, comes on the heels of other recent revelations about digital surveillance programs that suggest a growing push by Washington to check on what Americans are up to in real time, often when they’re not suspected of doing anything wrong.

But the national car-spying program also differs in scope and intent from terrorism-related National Security Agency surveillance programs such as those President Obama has recently vowed to scale back. Indeed, Americans may be more carefully weighing societal benefits versus privacy, given the ubiquity of Big Data and growing reliance on GPS-dependent hand-held computers and phones.

Today, “we either ignore the issue altogether or we run around like chickens, screaming, ‘Big Brother! Big Brother!’ ” says Clifford Fishman, a law professor who specializes in digital surveillance law at The Catholic University of America in Washington. “What we need to study is what we gain as a society by allowing government or industry to acquire, store, access, and use information about us versus what we give up in terms of privacy.”

“Technology now allows us to be followed or seen or photographed or videoed and have information stored every time we leave our homes,” Professor Fishman adds. “The Supreme Court’s standard of Americans having a reasonable expectation of privacy ... doesn’t work anymore, so we need a new way to define when privacy needs to be protected from digital surveillance and retention of data.”

To be sure, the US Supreme Court has begun to define those terms in several recent cases involving cellphone tracking, including a ruling last year that bars police from searching a person’s phone without a warrant. But given Washington’s proclivity to expand surveillance in the name of safety – as evidenced by the highway spying program – Americans need to remain suspicious, if not of the government’s motives, then of its competence, critics say.

“I think of this almost as a process issue more than a substance or constitutionality issue,” says Fred Cate, a senior fellow at Indiana University’s Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research in Bloomington. “The thing that feels particularly jarring is that nobody is forthright about what they’re doing.

“The notion that these cameras are purely for highway safety, then it’s for drugs, now it’s for other crimes, and that may be all appropriate, but each one should have been signaled to the public in a politically viable way,” Mr. Cate continues. “The pattern is that now we’re collecting cellphone calls, airplanes are actively deceiving you [with false cellphone signals], there’s a radar to look inside your house – and all of this we did not tell you about until a journalist uncovered it.”

The DEA project began in 2008. Low-key cameras take snapshots of license plates and even pictures of vehicle occupants, some of which are clear enough to identify passengers. So far, most of the cameras are along major drug smuggling routes along the border and key routes such as Interstate 95 in New Jersey. But given that the DEA considers nearly every US interstate a major drug smuggling route, the agency has vowed to continue expanding the program amid some successes – including, in 2010, the seizure of about 18,000 pounds of marijuana and about 200 pounds of cocaine.

Moreover, local police with proper federal clearance can tap into the database, “putting a wealth of information in the hands of local officials who can track vehicles in real time on major roadways,” writes The Wall Street Journal’s Devlin Barrett, who broke the story.

A spokesman for the Justice Department, which includes the DEA, told Mr. Barrett that the program complies with federal law. “It is not new that the DEA uses the license-plate reader program to arrest criminals and stop the flow of drugs in areas of high trafficking intensity,” the spokesman said.

But an emerging concern among privacy advocates is that the government isn’t properly weighing the cost-benefits of massive surveillance or sharing much information about the programs with the public. What’s more, one reason for the highway camera project is to increase so-called asset forfeitures of smugglers, meaning that there’s suddenly a cash incentive for police departments and federal agents to scan highways. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D) of Vermont said such incentives are cause for "even greater concern" about the program.

So far, the government has shown willingness to tweak the programs to assure the public. The DEA has reduced the amount of time that data are stored from three to two months.

But the biggest wrinkle in America’s ongoing debate about privacy in the technology age remains the ability of people to treat data with constitutional respect.

“We can create the perfect statutes and supplement that with the perfect set of regulations, but we know human beings are the creatures that are going to be using this, and misuses and abuses are therefore inevitable,” says Fishman.
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